Abstract
This essay explores G.R. Malkani’s reinvention of Advaita Vedānta in the context of neo-Vedānta in Indian academia during the colonial period. The first section examines why Advaita Vedānta received more attention than Buddhism despite unintelligibility of its central doctrine of the reality of Brahman and the unreality of the world of every day experience and why various forms of Vedānta continued to be vitally relevant to Indian society in its task of reforming itself into a vibrant modern society. The subsequent sections give a detailed account of Malkani’s presentation of some key concepts and issues in Advaita Vedānta and the Hegelian influence on his ‘free rendering’ of classical Advaita Vedānta.
Some parts of the exposition of Malkani’s thoughts are drawn from my earlier work The Philosophy of G.R. Malkani (Ed) Sharad Deshpande, 1997, I.C.P.R. Delhi.
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Notes
- 1.
Neo-Vedānta is usually held to be a reinvention of classical Advaita Vedānta in terms of Kant’s transcendental idealism , Hegel’s Absolute idealism and British neo-Hegelianism .
- 2.
In philosophy in Fifteen Modern Indian Languages (Bedekar 1979) gives an exhaustive account of how rich and diverse is the contribution of innumerable thinkers who wrote in regional languages and offered various reformulations of key Vedāntic concepts and also of Hinduism more generally.
- 3.
Ghanshamdas Ratanmal (G.R.) Malkani (c. 1892–1978) was born at Hyderabad Sind (now in Pakistan). Having obtained his Masters degree in 1916 from the University of Bombay, he became a research fellow in the first batch of the Indian Institute of Philosophy which was situated at Amalner , a small town in the north-western region of India known as East Khandesh in the erstwhile Bombay Presidency . Malkani obtained an M. Litt from Cambridge in 1921 under the supervision of James Ward , a famous psychologist and philosopher of idealist orientation. During his stay, he became acquainted with the philosophies of Kant and Hegel , and also of Bradley , Bosanquet and Bergson . On his return from Cambridge, he was appointed first as the superintendent in1924, as editor of the Philosophical Quarterly in 1926, and finally as the Director of the Indian Institute of Philosophy in 1935 succeeding K.C. Bhattacharyya (Deshpande 1997; Burch 1970). Malkani remained the Director of the Institute till its closure in 1966. Besides a large number of articles and monographs, his major publications include Philosophy of the Self (1939, Rpt. in U.S in 1966), A Study of Reality (1927), Vedantic Epistemology (1953) and Metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta (1961)—all published from Indian Institute of Philosophy, Amalner.
- 4.
General Presidential Address, Indian Philosophical Congress , XXIV Session, Patna, India, 1949.
- 5.
But Malkani was aware of these developments such as Logical Positivism (Malkani 1950).
- 6.
This debate is carried out in many ways. One such attempt—to which Malkani is responding—is by P.T. Raju in his Idealistic Thought of India (Raju 1953).
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Deshpande, S. (2015). G.R. Malkani: Reinventing Classical Advaita Vedānta . In: Deshpande, S. (eds) Philosophy in Colonial India. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 11. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2223-1_7
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